And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
The proposal doesn’t say what the interface between the browser and the OS / hardware is. They mention (but don’t elaborate on) modified browsers. Google’s track record includes:
So if Google can make it so you can’t run your own OS, and their OS won’t let you run your own browser (and BTW Microsoft and Apple are on a similar journey), and their browser won’t let you run an adblocker, where does that leave us?
It creates a ratchet effect where Google, Apple, and Microsoft can compete with each other, and the Internet is usable from their browsers running unmodified systems sold by them or their favoured vendors, but any other option becomes impractical as a daily driver, and they can effectively stack things against there ever being a new operating system / distro to compete with them, by making their web properties unusable and promoting that as the standard. This is a massive distortion of the open web from where it is now.
A regulation that if hardware has private or secret keys embedded into it, hardware manufacturers must provide the end user with those keys; and that if they have unchangeable public keys embedded and require that software be signed with that to boot or access some hardware, manufacturers must provide the private keys to end users. If that was the law in a few states that are big enough that manufacturers won’t just ignore them, it would shut down this sort of scheme.